Ways of interaction of illustrations and text in the popular science description of German crafts.

Abstract

The paper focuses on the mechanisms of interaction between graphic images and text descriptions, including historical and cultural information about ancient German crafts. The purpose of the article is to show the different types of interrelation of graphic images and verbal text. The concept of multimodality and discourse analysis serves as the theoretical and methodological basis of the research; selected works of recent years devoted to a given problem are presented in an overview. The methods of discourse analysis allow us to implement an extended approach to the discussion of different types of graphic sign systems and mechanisms of their interaction. The research material is a book about German crafts related to national architecture and construction technologies. Three ways of image and text interaction were identified. The first, the simplest, covers cases when the caption directly displays what is shown in the figure. In such cases, the image serves to clarify and concretize the text accompaniment. The second extensive group consists of examples when the text contains related information about the history of craft, the degree and causes of its prevalence in a certain area, etc. The third group consists of a few examples when the illustration is given an exclusively decorative function, and the text located next to it does not reveal a direct connection with the image. The three selected groups are nothing more than a research technique. In general, the image and text appear in the book as a holistic, communicatively indivisible unity.